Malcolm Mortimer interviewed by Mark Bilbe, An Oral History of the Wine Trade, 2004, catalogue reference C1088/30. © British Library Board.

Transcript

My original wine road started in February 1947 at the Grand Hotel, Swanage, where I learnt every facet of a hotel, including how to run a business, how to type, how to look after difficult customers, and yes, even how to buy wine.  And I bought my first case of decent wine from Eldridge Pope on 11th February 1947, which is quite an extraordinary date to start, in that my son and heir was also born on 11th February, some years later, of course.  But I enjoyed buying the beer and buying the wine for Grand Hotel, Swanage for a few months before I went in the army, and to a large extent in those days it was taking a quota of one bottle of Haig whisky, one bottle of Gordon’s gin, and two cases of table wine, if you were lucky.  So it was quite difficult, purchasing.  And it’s true to say that part of my job was buying a certain amount, tongue in cheek, of black-market goods, but bearing in mind we were trying to give extremely good value to all our lovely customers staying at the Grand Hotel, Swanage.  We regarded it as a luxury hotel, it really was, even in those scarce days when food was extremely hard to purchase in any sort of quantity.  The cheese ration was still only two ounces of cheese a week, and that was hardly adequate for a four-star hotel on the south coast trying to make a name for itself just after the war.  So it was an unusual time to start a wine road, but a very important one so far as my later life, in that I learnt how to run a business, how to look after the purchasing, how not to waste anything, because the secret, the real secret of any wine business is to keep the pig buckets empty.

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Malcolm Mortimer (Starting off as a trainee in Grand Hotel, Swanage)

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